Elden Ring Review
Elden Ring, the highly-anticipated new title by FromSoftware, is a Soulslike masterpiece that blends all the familiar elements of the Souls series—the high-skill sword-and-board combat, trial-by-fire progression, piecing together the story with flavor-text item descriptions, one-shot instadeath traps to keep you on your toes, coffin teleportation, and retrieve-your-money-on-death mechanics—together with newer mechanics like sneaking and horseback riding—all seamlessly integrated into a huge vibrant dreamlike open world oozing with dark and tragic story elements, unique characters, and brutal combat; think open-world Dark Souls without a lot of the shittiness that open-world design tends to bring.
Starting Off
Not going to lie, one of the first steps I took to start the game was to unset all of the gesture hotkeys. I can't recall how many times my character pumped her fist in the air instead of greeting a merchant or attempting to retrieve all of her lost runes while an enemy winds up a strong attack. Nothing quite like watching your character get run through while they helplessly jump for joy over the runes still lying on the ground.
Starting off the game, the controls feel very familiar to Dark Souls—dodge, block, parry, light attack, heavy attack, flask—so, I decided to go magic-based, picked the Prisoner starting class for the lovely helm, and away I went. Magic, however, was not as I expected. I envisioned summoning a colossal meteor of fiery doom to come crashing down and burn flesh from the skins of my foes, but instead I found that all of the apocalyptic spells are rooted in Faith rather than Intelligence. It turns out Intelligence is mainly for casting Magic Missiles and Bigger Magic Missiles.
I was doing pretty well—and by “pretty well” I mean mostly getting wrecked but still progressing—until Godrick crushed me. With the way my health bar disappeared each time I got hit, I figured that was FromSoftware telling me to try this area later. So, I took the hint and fucked off for a bit to explore Caelid where everything is infested with rot and seems like someone turned on Big Head Mode from Goldeneye 007 for the dogs and crows. I picked up Moonveil somewhere along the line, and finally all those points I’d pumped into Intelligence became useful!
The creators seem to keep upping the difficulty of the traps to keep players on their toes. When I’m dodging out of the way of one trap, another one has been placed and timed to exactly where I’ve just dodged... It’s like they figure out the most common reaction to everything and add a hole there for you to fall through.
The World of Elden Ring
The world is massive, and there are maps! This new addition to the Souls genre is most welcome; I couldn’t have kept track of the world without it. Find yourself a monument, and the map of that area is revealed. In the over-100 hours I’ve played, I still haven’t made it to all of the areas because there is just so much content. According to some, the map size is somewhere between Skyrim and The Witcher 3.
Even with a gigantic map, the world feels appropriately full and cohesive. There aren’t random chests lying around like candy for children on Halloween: everything is in a place that makes sense. You have to work for your loot because it’s guarded at the back of an underground tomb full of poisonous rats, as it should be.
Similarly, each dungeon in Elden Ring seems fairly unique despite its open-world-ness; each dungeon feels hand crafted rather than the same room reconfigured with dozens of different puzzles (looking at you Breath of the Wild). I did, however, notice one mine with the same elevator shaft in three places… Feels like every mine elevator shaft is the same: jump down the ledges on the left side, maybe find an item in the little cove, land at the bottom.
Characters in the game are extremely well done; there is a huge diversity between characters: each one is unique and all seem to have some amount of character development through the story. I found none of the characters to be bland, including the submissive demi-human, while simultaneously their stories all meshed together seamlessly (see what I did there?). Alexander is one of my absolute favorites; I wish there was more of him in the game. I have to admit, though, I did get confused between Rennala, Renna, and Ranni, given the name similarity…
Even the less-interesting stuff in Elden Ring has charm. The penguins fly, eagles perch so close to the cliff that your horse falls off every time, and there are rolling goats! Who doesn’t love goats and springhares rolling around like Sonic the Hedgehog? There are even eagles with swords for legs (yeah, good luck with those)!
New Systems
Item crafting is an interesting new addition to the series. Rather than farming enemies to stock up on those poison cures like prior games, they can crafted at will now. While you do need to pick up many materials from the ground, I didn’t feel the need to go out of my way for any; I generally had plenty of crafting materials to craft a reasonable amount of anything. I definitely appreciate crafting without needing to visit Sites of Grace, too. Well done.
I was excited to see what garment alterations were all about, which is why I was quite disappointed with it. It seems like only about 5 items in the game can be altered, and the effects are so small that I need a calculator to figure out if it’s worth changing. Did we need a whole new in-game system just to remove and reattach capes?
Conclusion
Throughout the game, I felt a variety of emotions: excitement, frustration, panic, resolve, triumph, avarice, grief, sadness, and more. At no point in the game, however, did I ever feel bored; this is a huge accomplishment for an open-world game with a map larger than Skyrim. The world of Elden Ring really comes to life in a wonderful orchestration of story telling and challenge. If you play one game released in 2022, this should be it.
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